FAIRFIELD — A pickup bounces along a gravel road just north of what is officially listed as the Big Brown Steam Electric Station, past swatches of oak trees and cattle herds bent over the coastal Bermuda grass.

Barry Capps is working to keep the truck on the road while drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and ticking off the multitude of reasons he believes the jury is still out on mankind’s impact on climate change — one facet of which involves something he read about Iceland’s glaciers developing and retracting eons ago.

And even if it is true, so what, he asks? Why should that mean the end of Big Brown, which burns a particularly carbon-heavy brand of coal known as lignite and has been targeted by environmentalists for years.

“In the society we live in, there’s risk when you get up in the morning,” says Capps, who owns a feed and fertilizer business and like most everyone in town does business with the plant.

“All these people that want to shut down the plant, I think if they took the time to come down here and talk to someone who was here before the plant, I think they’d change their mind.”

Since President Barack Obama announced last week that the Environmental Protection Agency would establish a standard for greenhouse gas emissions by 2015, the future of coal in the United States as a power source has become a larger question.

And perhaps nowhere more than in East Texas’ coal belt, where the potential loss of plants and mines stands to land a devastating blow on economies where jobs are otherwise hard to come by.

Older plants

Nothing is certain yet. The standards will take years to be determined and will probably face contentious litigation dragging the process out even further. But older coal plants like the one in Fairfield could face a bleak future, said Bruce Bullock, director of SMU’s Maguire Energy Institute.

“It really is going to depend on how high they set the bar,” he said. “You can build new coal plants that are very, very efficient in term of carbon emissions, but for existing plants, depending on how expensive they are to retrofit and how quickly you have to do it, it could have a significant impact.”

Already facing stiff competition from the flood of cheap natural gas into the marketplace and derided by environmentalists for its heavy emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, coal power has seen it fortunes decline in recent years.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the proportion of the nation’s electricity generated by coal shrank from 48 percent in 2008 to 37 percent last year. Texas uses more natural gas than the national average but has seen a similar trend.

Testimony

Still, it’s the largest chunk of the national electricity market. When Gina McCarthy, Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, appeared before a Senate confirmation panel in April, she testified, “Coal has been and will continue to be a significant source of energy in the United States, and I take my job seriously when developing those standards to provide flexibility in the rules.”

But the question of which coal plants will survive has yet to be answered.

Mac McFarland, the CEO of Luminant, which operates Big Brown and five other coal-fired plants in East Texas, said that if the new environmental regulations were too stringent with too short a window for implementation, coal power would probably downsize.

“If we were to have to do it overnight, it would have a dramatic impact,” he said.

Training

Big Brown opened in 1971 about 10 miles northeast of Fairfield’s center, taking advantage of the abundant coal buried just 100 feet underground.

The plant was a savior. Cotton farming dried up by the 1960s, and for young people, prospects were few and far between in the town of about 2,900. Either you got lucky and found a job on a ranch or left for Houston or Dallas.

“Before the plant came, maybe two people from each graduating class would actually stay here,” said Dickie Hill, 74, a rancher and one of the town’s largest landowners.

Nowadays, people with nothing more than a high school diploma can enter the plant’s training program and earn $20 an hour. The idyllic downtown counts not one but two spas and an art gallery. Some refer to the school district as “3A Highland Park.”

“You can’t get into the basketball games. One-act plays are filled to the rafters. The people who live in this town love this town,” said Katie Ryan, superintendent of the Fairfield Independent School District. “It still has that old Norman Rockwell nostalgia.”

And that sentiment extends to the coal plant, which residents defend fiercely, especially on environmental issues. A few years ago Helen Pickett was one of a handful of residents who petitioned the town council for an air quality monitor to see what they were breathing.

The idea generated little support, she said.

“I think some people are afraid to speak up because they work for the coal plant or have family that does,” Pickett said. “They’re so snug into the community.”

Sitting in a restaurant at the side of I-45 last week, Mayor Roy Hill said nearby natural gas fields provide some job prospects. But it’s not enough to keep the younger generation in town if the plant — with its more than 350 jobs — were to shut down.

Wait and see

Hill, a wealthy attorney and former oil industry consultant, has his own plans to help save the town. Five years ago he and some partners started a company looking to remove pollutants from coal. He says his researchers have developed a technique for extracting carbon dioxide — though he admits it’s still under testing.

“The idea is to keep the younger generation here, because if you don’t, your town is eventually going to die,” he said. “We knew if we were going to keep the plant here we had to deal with the environmental issue. It’s not going away.”

Clean-burning coal represents something of a golden ring for the coal industry.

But technologies like the one Hill is proposing have yet to prove themselves, McFarland said. And he was also skeptical of carbon sequestration, a technique in which carbon dioxide is extracted from emissions and stored underground. The Obama administration has pushed sequestration as a potential tool in cutting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Right now “there’s very little that can be done to reduce carbon dioxide,” McFarland said.

For now, there is little for towns like Fairfield to do but wait and see.

There is already talk of what happened in nearby Rockdale when an aluminum manufacturer there cut back operations, laying off 900 people.

At Fairfield Lake last week, children played in the water kept unnaturally warm by the water pumped out by Big Brown.

Michelle Mason, 43, lounged on the grass waiting for her grandchildren. She recollected how Luminant had threatened to shut down the plant two years ago over federal air quality standards and the rancor in the town that followed.

“People got pretty upset,” she said. “It feels like almost everyone in the town works there. I don’t know what would happen if it wasn’t here anymore.”

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